Ectoplasm. That's ghost slime. We got there, We did it, ectoplasm. Most people actually associate ectoplasm with the movie Ghostbusters, big green ghost guy, slimer, sliming around, actoplasmic residue, sampleuisms, exter real thing somebody blows and knows and you want to keep it to analyzem. I always thought that Dan Ackroyd and Harold Ramos, who wrote Ghostbusters ever read a book, used the word ectoplasm just because it's sort of sounded ghostie. But it turns out Dan Ackroyd was raised a spiritualist. He's a third generation spiritualist. Here's an interview he did with his father, Peter Ackroyd discussing just that very much. So my my experience going up to the old farmhouse, which was used partially as a cottage by various members of the family through through my youth and college years and second city years. Uh, just as you'd see life magazines or National Geographic lying around many cottages, we had the American Society for Psychical Research journals lying right, and all kinds of books that were handed down from uh, from my from Sam and Morris, who was dad's father, Bell telephone engineer, So the whole family was sort of steeped in this, uh this kind of just accepted fact that, uh, spirits do exist and can can you communicate if you find a talented medium him or her who is willing to give themselves up to the controls and the controls are the entities from the other side that come through. And so that combined with an article in the a spr Journal about quantum physics and parapsychology and my love of old ghost movies from the thirties and forties, Bob Hope, Abbot Costello, the Bowery Boys, um that sort of funeral married together to to produce the first draft of Ghostbust. This is the best. Dan Ackroyd is a based multigenerational spiritualist, which, as we've discussed, is pretty rare, but his grandfather was a member at Cassadega's sister camp in lily Dale, New York, and a number of the publications and organizations he's discussing in that clip are relevant to what we're talking about today. The second Spiritualist revival of the nineteen twenties and the most famous schism in all of spiritualism, the one between Harry Houdini and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. But before we can get there, let's get you up to speed on ectoplasm Baby. We've talked a lot on Ghost Church about the Fox Sisters, the founders of American Spiritualism, who by the mid eighteen nineties had passed into spirit in semi obscurity and poverty. Some of the reasons that their mediumship had been discredit at it over the years had to do with an increased demand for physical manifestations of spirit, basically adding in magic tricks to existing mediumship to make it a little flashier, a little show ear and meet this consumer demand for a real spectacle. When contacting their dead, Americans liked things big and slimy and loud. It's kind of our thing. But it led to many, many widely debunked practices that were a long way from these simple table wrappings that defined the Fox Sisters seance. Maggie Fox said this when she first disavowed her religion publicly back in in a column that we've read on the show before, called the Curse of Spiritualism, she writes, fanatics ignore the wrappings, which is the only part of the phenomena that is worthy of notice and rush madly after the glaring humbugs that flood New York. So what phenomena is she talking about here? Well, it was the kind of stuff that organizations like the Society for Psychical Research, which was founded as a nonprofit in the UK in two were dedicated to busting. They'd investigate this sort of phenomena to determine whether they were authentic or not. Things like spirit photography, the practice where you're dead would appear in a translucent picture with you, as well as physical manifestations basically the seance on steroids, practices that took mental and trance, mediumship and in the pitch dark of the seance room. Added things like spirit hands, which was a slimy hand that reached across to you in the dark from across the vale. Things like slate writing, where a spirit would write messages, trumpet mediumship, which is still in occasional practice in Cassadeca today, and ectoplasm, which if a medium could goop it out, basically served as goes Lube. I guess, oh you didn't like to hear that? You didn't like to hear Jamie say, ghost lube will imagine how I feel huh. Ectoplasm became more common in the mid eighteen nineties post boxes and was said to manifest in mediums while in a trance state, almost as proof that they had contacted the other side. It came out a little different from every medium. One psychical researcher named gusav Gelli described it like this, very variable in appearance, being sometimes vaporous, sometimes a plastic pace, sometimes a bundle of fine threads, or a membrane with swellings or fringes, or a fine fabric like tissue. But others defined ectoplasm somewhat differently. Let's get our friend, iconic spiritualist and creator of Sherlock Holmes, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, on how he describes ectoplasm viscous last a substance which appeared to differ from every known form of matter in that it could solidify and be used for material purposes. Wow, disgusting. Here's a secret. Unlike many elements of spiritualism, particularly transcend mental mediumship, which I am still inclined to believe to some extent, there is no modern spiritualist I've spoken to or seen writing that stands by things like ectoplasm or the spirit hands, nor the facial manifestations and full bodies that are sometimes said to accompany them. These super extreme practices have been pretty thoroughly debunked over the years, and we could spend hours talking about specific examples, many of which involve the majority male investigators, ghostbusters, if you will, going after female mediums relentlessly, not only until they're busted, but sometimes until they're ruined. This is of interest to me. Ectoplasm was often revealed to be cheesecloth covered in egg white or potato starch, gauze, handkerchiefs, rubber gloves. Honestly, the photos of what was said to be ectoplasm are pretty funny. It's mostly mystical looking women with a mouth or a vagina full of soggy fabric. But it's important to consider why this caught on so much and the very gender dynamics that are at play. The physical medium will be talking about a lot today. Mina Crandon was known specifically for manifesting ectoplasm and spirit hands from her vagina. So while the concept is maybe a little silly, what I've been finding is yet another crack in this reputation that spiritualism has built for itself as being a religion that has historically supported and respected women, and there's no better story to demonstrate that and the politics of the last major spiritualist revival in the United States. Then the feud between Harry Houdini and Arthur Conan Doyle over the mediumship of Mina Crandon, a story that leads to history's most iconic magician. Oh nope, wait, oh, I am so sorry about that. The Chris Angel that lives under my bed took issue. Sorry, second most iconic magician, Harry Houdini dedicated years of his life to ruin her life. It's a witch hunt baby. Today on Kay welcome back and happy Ectoplasm episode to all who observe. I still have a lot to tell you about my last day in Cassadega, but this week we've got a lot of spectral goop to wade through. Arthur Conan Doyle and Harry Houdini wouldn't actually meet until but Doyle had become a spiritualist publicly back in the eighteen eighties, at the time joining the Society for Psychical Research in eight the same year he killed off his most famous creation, Sherlock Holmes in the adventure of the Final Problem. Holmes would be brought back by the early nineteen hundreds, but at this time Doyle was trying to make a clean break from the King of Deduction for a reason unbeknownst to many at this time, Doyle's father, who was said to have had mediumistic talents as well as being a deeply depressive painter who struggled with alcoholism, had been committed to an asylum in the mid eighteen eighties after displaying erratic behavior. Going back to when Arthur Conan Doyle was a kid, this seems to have inspired a streak of extreme pragmatism in his most famous son. Arthur Conan Doyle trained to be a doctor, and when he did begin writing fiction, it was about a character who famously used logic and not art to ground the story. Do you want to take us to it? What do we know about this court kid? Has not left us with much? Just the shirt, the trials, they're pretty formal. Maybe he was going out for the night and the trousers a heavy duty polliat said nasty, same as the shirt cheap. They're both too big for him. So some kind of standard issue uniform dressed for work. Then what kind of work God that shows annoying? So in three Arthur Conan, Doyle's father dies, and while they hadn't been completely estranged, Doyle began to think back on the judgments he had made on his father's beliefs. His father used to send the family paintings with messages attached like this, keep steadily in view that this book is ascribed wholly to the produce of a madman. Whereabouts would you say was the deficiency of intellect or depraved taste? And Doyle started to con it are that his father's leaned towards the supernatural may have had something to it all along. So he removed himself from the logic and pragmatism that had won him the respect of the world through homes and instead threw himself into spiritualism hard, beginning in the eighteen nineties all the way up to his death in ninety. His wife Jean was said to be a medium and also became passionately supportive within the religion. So by the late nineteen tenth he'd sort of become a figurehead within spiritualism and had thrown all of his professional credibility into it with a lot of success, I might add he had been touring across the US and UK lecturing. He wrote twenty books on the topic of spiritualism, with titles like The Case for spirit Photography, to the Coming of the Fairies, to my favorite, The Edge of the Unknown. The Coming of the Fairies also rocks, though it's kind of this aimless series of photos of people and fairy toys and the rest of it is basically Arthur Conan Doyle being really defensive and saying things like this, The cry of faith is sure to be raised and will make some impression upon those who have not had the opportunity of knowing the people concerned or the place. If you knew his friends, you'd believe in fairies. So chill. Also, there are a lot of long descriptions of elves. There is an ornamental rim to the pipe of the elves, which shows that the graces of art are not unknown among them. And what joy is in the complete abandoned of their little graceful figures as they let themselves go in the dance. They may have their shadows and trials as we have, but at least there is a great gladness manifest in this demonstration of their life, Doyle wasn't the only major public figure who is excited about spirit communication. Throughout the nineteen tens and nineteen twenties, Sigmund Freud would join the British Society for Psychical Research and started to think that telepathy was possible in the conscious and unconscious realms. Classic Freud Upton Sinclair, who is most famous for The Jungle, a book that I read for my book about hot Dogs. Upton Sinclair had a wife named Mary who believed herself to be psychic, and he published a book on these so so results of testing her abilities, called mental Radio. Carl Young participated in family sciences early in life, wrote his doctoral thesis seeking a medical precedent for medialistic behavior, and went on to become the founder of psychoanalysis while continuing to attend seances into his fifties. Rudyard kipling sister had been a medium, but Sir Arthur Conan Doyle ended up at the forefront of the spiritualist revival that was in large part brought on by people's desire to reconnect with lost soldiers from World War One. Just as the first major spiritualist craze had piqued during the Civil War. He famously and tragically found out that his beloved son had been killed in battle in nineteen eighteen, shortly before giving a speech about spirit communication. But he still went on saying this not too worry, Not to worry, my son survived. The world had changed and it had stayed the same. Emphasis was still on expansion on technological progress, and you start to see known scientists and inventors actively engaging with spiritualist ideas because of its alleged connection to science. Remember to this day this is one of the major spiritualist principles. We have communication scuttle, and so the science community becomes very involved. You'll find people like Thomas Edison developing ideas like the spirit phone, and eventually abandoned n idea that he toyed around with that was supposed to literally let you ring up your dead uncle. There was also Sir Oliver Lodge, a scientist who at first was famous in being integral to the invention of radio and developing ideas around electromagnetism. He then found a second act, writing one of the most famous spiritual texts ever called Raymond or Life and Death, a channel text in which Lodge's son Raymond, who had been killed at Flanders in ninetift spoke to him from beyond the veil to tell people what happened after death. It was a best seller for three years and popularized the idea of the summerland, where spirits are said to go when they have moved on. I've read sections of it, and it's a very sad and pretty remarkable book, one that is sort of half spiritualist propaganda and half just a father deeply missing his son who was killed in combat and is trying to make sense of it. He includes letters that Raymond wrote while he was alive, and you could really feel his grief between reminders that death means nothing, saying things like this, Indeed, it is not right that we should weep for death like his. Rather, let us pay him our homage and praise and imitation by growing like him, and by holding our lives lightly in our country service, so that, if need be, we may die like him. Lodge was a friend of Doyle's, a former president of the Society for Psychical Research who had a so so reputation as an investigator after falling for several mediums who later revealed themselves to be frauds. Now. Look, I want to hold space for how genuinely cool I think it is that, like the Foxes, the Ectoplasmic Sisterhood had a pretty good run at the top of the twentieth century. They were doing things that would have gotten them tried and killed under witchcraft laws in the past. They were physically autonomous. They were essentially turning the horn tendencies of straight male attendees at a seance right back against them. I think it's pretty cool. It looks like a hell of a show, and also it's a little silly and it makes me laugh. Sorry. Meanwhile, as books like Raymond were becoming popular, ectoplasmic mediums were being taken out right and left. A famous example is Ava Carriere or Eva c who was famous for having these wild seances where she would materialize a spirit named be and Boa, a Brahmin Hindu spirit who was said to be over three hundred years old who Ava appeared to have made up. The spirit she called Bean Boa was later revealed to be a combination of kind of obvious cardboard cutouts and hired actors. But Carriere was heavily focused on and investigated by these psychical research firms, likely because of her methods and who she was. She was, first of all, a queer, a woman. She performed with her girlfriend, who was twenty five years her senior, and she performed in a very sexualized way. She'd often be nude during seances. She'd produce ectoplasm from every orifice. Her girlfriend slash assistant would sometimes finger her in front of everyone to assure them that the ectoplasm was there. In addition to hired actors and three hundred year old spirits, Eva C was also said to occasionally have sex at the end of the seances, either with her girlfriend assistant or with an attendee. Doyle and Houdini both saw her perform, and Doyle was pretty convinced, Houdini not so much. But in her day she got quite a bit of press, and many seemed relieved when her methods were proven to be false. She was too sexually dangerous. All this to say Eva C. Happy pride wherever you are, and to mention that while agencies like the spr did bust spirit photographers and slate writers, their most high profile targets or women who were known to use their bodies and gush ghost moubes from their holes and what about that Houdini, the same Houdini who grew up in a poor Hungarian Jewish family in Wisconsin with six siblings, who established himself as a magician at carnivals, often using some of the same hot and cold reading techniques that phony mediums do. Hot reading being preresearch targeted at a mark, and cold reading being saying something vague that someone's bound to pick up on and acting like you knew the whole time. But eventually he settled on what he was passionate about and became primarily known as an escape artist, known for things like the water torture cell, the straight jacket escape, the buried Alive thingy. He also became an extremely effective self promoter. Ego was a big part of what Houdini did. This was the guy who would say, of like this, no prison can all be. No handle leg irons or steel locks can shackle me, No ropes or chains can keep me from my freedom. This is the guy who advertised in eighteen ninety seven saying, Rudini the Great will Sunday night give a seance in the open light. Rudini kind of goes on this journey and his attitudes towards spirit communication throughout his life. Early on, he says he was always interested in spirit communication and didn't disbelieve in it at all. The only catch was he understood many of the methods that fraudulent mediums had used because he'd used some of the same tactics in his early magic days. This interest was compounded by two important events in the nineteen tens, the first being the death of his beloved mother in thirteen. Udini was very close with his mother. A book I read to prepare for this episode, called The Witch of Lime Street, used this brutal phrase, saying the umbilical cord was the only rope Houdini had never slipped go off. He openly wept mid interview when he learned of her death. They were very close, and after her death, Rudini eagerly attended spiritualist seances in hope of making contact, but wasn't convinced by any of the mediums he spoke with. He framed it like this in his nineteen twenty four book A Magician among the Spirits. From my early career as a mystical entertainer, I have been interested in spiritualism as belonging to the category of mysticism, and as a sideline to my own phase of mystery shows, I have associated myself with mediums joining the rank and vile, and held seances as an independent medium to fathom the truth of it all. At the time, I appreciated the fact that I surprised my clients, but while aware of the fact that I was deceiving them, I did not see or understand the seriousness of trifling with such sacred sentimentality and the baneful result which inevitably followed. To me, it was a arc. As I advanced to riper years of experience, I was brought to a realization of the seriousness of trifling with the hallowed reverence which the average human being bestows on the departed, And when I personally became afflicted with similar grief, I was chagrined that I should ever have been guilty of such frivality, and for the first time realized that it bordered on crime. So yeah, he felt, as many have over the years, that a magician is more ethical than a medium, because with a magician, it's understood that what is happening is not real. But if a medium does the same thing, and calls it religion he felt that was inherently exploitative. Rudini walks this line carefully throughout his years of spiritualist busting in the nineteen twenties. The way he presents it is it's not that he doesn't believe in it, it's just that he's only seen fakery. The second thing that happens in the nineteen tens is a conversation Houdini has with a formerly famous spiritualist named I A. Davenport. He's come up on this show before. He was half of a spiritualist team called the Davenport Brothers, two teenagers named Ira and William who had hopped onto the spiritualist train after being inspired by the Foxes in the early eighteen fifties. They became known for their spirit Cabinet, where they would be tied together in a closed box full of instruments. The box would close, the instruments would mysteriously be played by the spirits. The box would open, and the boys would still be tied together as if nothing had happened. This was revealed to be a magic trick and not a supernatural event. Many times there were two magicians slash investigators that followed the Davenport Brothers all around England in order to bust them. Ira is said to have talked to Houdini in nineteen eleven, shortly before his death, and finally admitted that the spirit Box was a hoax and shared how he did it. Houdini describes the conversation like the US with a classic Houdini Bragg wedged in there. He said that he recognized in me a past master of the craft, and therefore spoke openly and did not hesitate to tell me the secrets of his feats. We discussed and analyzed the statements made in his letters to me, and he frankly admitted that the work of the daven Board Brothers was accomplished by perfectly natural means and belonged to that class of feats commonly credited the physical dexterity. Not once was there even a hint that spiritualism was of any concern to him, instead discussing his work as straightforward showmanship. Arthur Conan Doyle refuted this last claim, saying that while the spirit Box had been disowned, Ira had remained a practicing spiritualist. So before they even meet, the boys are already fighting by the late nineteen tents, Houdini and Doyle were pretty engaged in spiritualist ideas, but from opposite advantage points. Houdini was growing steadily more discouraged with it and more and more convinced that mediums were wholesale frauds and unethical, while Doyle had become the figurehead of the movement, a missionary the tom cruise of the situation. So it's only a matter of time and in Ny they finally meet. Doyle recounts his impression of Houdini in his book The Edge of the Unknown. Budini is far and away the most curious and intriguing character whom I have ever encountered. I have met better men, and I have certainly met very many worse ones, but I have never met a man who had such strange contrasts in his nature and whose actions and motives it was more difficult to foresee or to reconcile. And Houdini says this of Doyle, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, the sincere and confirmed believer in spirit phenomena whose acquaintance I esteem advises me that I do not secure convincing results because I am a skeptic and I therefore want to make it clear that I am not a scoffer. Doyle had gone to see a show of Houdini's at the Great Theater in London and was blown away. Houdini was eager to meet him too. He'd been intrigued to hear that Doyle answer Oliver Lodge believed to be communicating with their dead sons. The men both had great and trustworthy reputations. Why not to have a talk with them. The two began to exchange letters, and Houdini was still very much open to the concept of spirit communication around this time. He just wanted to see one medium who didn't fall back on what he felt were cheap magic tricks when their psychic abilities failed them. This motivated him to do something Doyle had been doing for years. He started to investigate many of the same European physical mediums. Unlike Doyle, Houdini was unmoved by basically everyone and immediately starts this creepy pattern of becoming annoyed that mediums vaginas are not being more thoroughly inspected. At no time, to my knowledge, did the search include the orifices of her body. Stop. Stop. You might remember that this is a pattern carried over from the Fox Sisters years and the many humiliating physical inspections that they underwent in their careers as mediums. In this era of investigation, where goo was literally gushing from orifices, the inspections became all the more invasive. However, despite Houdini's cavity search preferences and disagreement on the authenticity of the mediums that Doyle endorsed, they became friends, and Houdini felt that the Doyles, Sir Arthur and his wife Jane the medium, genuinely believed what they were saying. Based on their early interactions, it seemed like Houdini was inclined to be won over by the Doyles. He had a short lived film career in the early twenties that included a nine movie called The Man from Beyond, a silent movie where the idea of reincarnation is integral to the plot. He even cites Doyle's work in the text, Doyle happened to be in New York when this movie premiered. He was there going on this hot streak of spiritualist lectures that were selling out Carnegie Hall night after night, packing the house with war widows that wanted to get in touch with dead soldiers, and the Doyles loved the movie. They were touched to see the Man from Beyond advertised with blinds like audiences everywhere were welcome at his evidence that loved ones gone to the great beyond. I'm not lost to us forever. Variety said that Houdini's attempt to marry magicians logic and spiritualist logic was a failure. The two things don't go together, it said, but the boys didn't care. They enjoyed writing each other letters, and Doyle felt optimistic that Houdini would come around while he continued to tour with images of fairies and spirit photography and yes, a strong endorsement of Eva cs ectoplasm until the Atlantic City trip. In the Houdini's and the Doyles spent the weekend in Atlantic City, New Jersey together. I mean incredible. I love it, But after two blissful years of friendship, this trip was unfortunately the beginning of the end. At some point in the trip, Jean felt comfortable enough with the Houdini's to ask if they would sit for a mediumship session with her Harry, specifically in an attempt to contact his mother. Interestingly, like the Fox Sisters, this story has been covered on Drunk History, and Lucia's Dylan gets it pretty good, with the exception of being completely dismissive of spiritualism, mediums and Houdini's latent misogyny. Oh here's the clip, Sir Arthur Conan do. I was like, I want you to sit down and have this seance, and I have my wife is going to speak your mother's words through handwriting. Really, Budiny, shut up quite uh, I know your skeptical. Let's just do this. His wife was like, Hey, we're all here, we're doing the seance. Let's speak to Houdini's mother, so then it would happen. Oh, my son, I'm so happy to speak to you. I'm gonna put a cross on top of this thing, short across on the top of the thing. Mrs Houdiny was Jewish. In reality, Jeam channels over is of handwriting from Houdini's mother, and while the cross thing is true, what disillusioned Houdini was the fact that his mother barely spoke English and he didn't feel that she would ever have communicated with him in that language. But he didn't say that to the Doyle's In the moment, the Doyles thought that Houdini was moved, and they left for England, seen off by Houdini and Bess at the wharf, thinking that they had finally sold him on it. So a quick moment of acknowledgment for Harry Houdini's wife, the often overlooked Best Houdini, who both inspired a Kitler song and said a lot of confusing and vaguely horny early twentieth century things that make me laugh, such as saying that she sold her virginity for an orange. What I digress privately. Houdini's opinion of the seance and officially begun to permanently sour. By Halloween of that year, he told the New York Son spiritualism is nothing more than spook tricks, and mediums are either crooked or hysterical. This piste. Mr Sherlock Art He felt that Houdini was being dramatic for press, and wrote as much to him in a letter. They sent me The New York Sun with your article, and no doubt wanted me to answer them. But I have no fancy for sparring with a friend in pub when you say you have had no evidence of survival. You say what I cannot reconcile with my own eyes. I know by many examples the purity of my wife's mediumship, and I saw what you thought and what the effect was on you at the time. You're right that you are very sore. I trust that it is not with me, because you, having been truthful and manly all your life, naturally must admire the same traits and other human beings. Now boys and at this point, Houdini went on the offensive and signed up to be a judge this high profile panel sponsored by the Scientific American to determine once and for all if mediumship could be scientifically proven. After trying to nail down the science behind spiritual phenomena, if any, for months and years, the Classic magazine offered five thousand dollars in nineteen twenties money to any medium who could prove to a panel of scientists and experts that their abilities were scientifically legitimate. This might sound kind of weird that a science magazine would want to write about ghosts, but this was actually pretty standard for this time. I mean, spiritualist ideas were included in the earliest publications of psychology. In pamphlet from the Liverpool Psychological Society included a bullet point saying it cared about the dissemination of knowledge by means of the public instruction, lectures, reading rooms, the press, and spirit communion. They bailed on the idea by the end of the century, but it was there and again. These spiritual revivals tended to happen during times of rapid technological and social progress, as well as times of massive lost life. This contest took place two years after women had gotten the vote, while the gigantic losses of World War Two were still at the top of everyone's mind, while electricity and radio were spreading across the country. While scientific theories like evolution had managed to tie in with spiritualism and caused observers of the religion to believe that spirits evolve in addition to our bodies over time. The second revival came at this interesting time where science was not yet considered not magic and most skeptics were still open to alternative ideas. A critical element to these scientific American tests was how rigorous the panel was allowed to be with mediums who were subjecting themselves to inspection. The magazine listed materials like quote, induction coils, galvanometers, electroscopes, et cetera, Some with the purpose of testing the electrical condition of the medium at the moment when phenomena are produced, others to prove the presence or absence of material objects unquote. Doyle had tried to convince a Scientific American editor named James Malcolm Bird not to have Houdini on the board. No such luck, although Bird was considered to be an extremely gullible man who would flop so hard that he would lose his standing both at the American Society for Psychical Research and his job at the Scientific American in the next ten years. Once the Scientific American open investigation began, it went on for over a year, with the rift between Houdini and Doyle growing. All the while, Houdini and the judges found it pretty easy to dismiss most of the media ms that came through. Many who came in were women and would have to wear a black bathing suit and be marked and glow in the dark paint so that the seance room could remain dark as required. For some time, the Scientific Americans Library became a seance room where experts discredited medium. After medium, finding no real viable contenders, Houdini was removed from the board at least once when he broke a story ahead of the magazine's publication, and, in classic Puddini fashion, took more credit then made sense. He went back to touring his magic show at the same time that Doyle was doing one of his most extensive American speaking tours yet. And they even run into each other on the road and have a picnic. But still Budini cannot resist talking behind people's backs, he wrote in a letter to his wife Bess later, Doyle is a historical character, and his word goes far, in fact, much further than mine. It is a little bizarre that Houdini was being treated as a scientist and a man of letters that he never had really been known for in these years, but comments like this suggests that that might have been how he wanted to be viewed. The process of going legit had begun and would continue after these years of ghost busting ended, when he would try to get back on track to further his education and even become a college professor. It's around this time that Marjorie Mina Crandon comes into the picture. Marjorie is the subject of The Witch of Lime Street, Seance, Seduction and Houdini in the Spirit World by David Jahr. Maybe I'm especially partial to her because she begins life as a poor lady in Boston who rises the social ranks, marries a doctor and becomes the most convincing and bewildering medium of her era. Plus her act was really horny. I mean, who cares if it was real? It's a victimless crime. And as an added dash of authenticity, Marjorie had no real history of interest in mediumship prior to an impromptu science at a party, pretty normal practice for the time, where she blew people away with what her friends thought was a natural ability. So over a year into the Scientific American Contest, the judging board is beginning to run out of hope until Mina's husband, doctor Roy Crandon, submitted her after being in touch briefly with none other than Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. Marjorie was extremely charming. Many mediums of this time and still now skew a little older, but Marjorie was in her thirties, very traditionally attractive, with a blonde bob and a good sense of humor. And while she was tested in many locations all over Boston. The Scientific American Board planned to come to her house on Lime Street. The judging crew included Deini, a psychical researcher named Walter Prince, the inventor of Technicolor, Daniel Comstock, Harvard professor William McDougall, an amateur magician Haro Word Carrington. Keep that last name in mind while preparing for her formal tests. The way Marjorie's mediumship manifested became a lot. She did consent to Judini's weird cavity search and would then produce ectoplasm, most notably from her vagina. She would produce spirit hands from her vagina that we're all cold and slimy. She could make tables lift, bell boxes ring, and she tended to channel one particular spirit, her brother Walter, who had been tragically crushed between railway cars years before, and Walter as channeled by his sister. Marjorie was a real jokester in these test seances, saying things like this laugh and if you can't laugh, then look in the mirror. He teased judges and press, He flirt with whim in, and he was said to have a deeply masculine voice that threw itself all over the place. His masculinity actually seemed to be a big selling point for people. Walter would mostly talk, but he also moved the table, he pinched, he teased. At one point, a judge asked him to kick him in the face and then said thank you when he did. Marjorie was tested at Harvard and did well, particularly with Scientific American editor the famously gullible Jay Bird, who started publishing glowing reviews about her before she even formally sat down with the Scientific American board. So Houdini sees this and says, I think I'll go to Boston to test Marjorie before Bird poisoned the well in her favor permanently. By all accounts, Marjorie Crandon and Harry Houdini had a pretty warm friendship, even when he was publicly dragging her. This sounded similar to his relationship with Doyle, who rarely said anything unkind about Houdini publicly. I don't get it. I'm assuming he was very likable in person, but she likes him. Marjorie later writes him a letter that says, I have been hearing some very nice things about you lately, so I'm glad to be able to say I know the great Houdini. But she's still nervous before he arrives at Lime Street, as demonstrated by a letter that her husband, Dr Crandon writes to Arthur Conan Doyle. I think Psyche, my wife is somewhat disturbed by it internally because of Houdini's general nastiness. She's vomiting merrily this morning. Make no mistake. Houdini always thought that Marjorie was a fraud, but it didn't matter what he thought if he couldn't explain how she was doing it. So he conceals his frustration in the moment. But after the spirit Walter chides him, saying, you, Houdini, think you're pretty smart. Houdini started quietly forming theories. Maybe there's a third party. He went to a second seance test the next night, as Doyle waited across the ocean, getting regular updates from Marjorie's husband. Rudini forms more theories this night. Maybe she's using her head to move the table without it registering with the glow paint she wore. But again he can't really prove it, so she's moved on to the next round. The Crandons are stoked about this, and Houdini is getting frustrated. Gone are the days where he seems to be sincerely interested in spirit communication and disproving Marjorie's abilities becomes his central focus in life. For the next test, Rudini began working on a restraint for Marjorie that he thought would prevent her from performing any of the physical tricks he suspected her of as Walter. While he was doing this, the press around their impending seance in the summer of nineteen twenty four got huge. Marjorie, who was going by mina to protect her identity, had her identity and addressed doxed in the press, and her first marriage made a mockery of People began heavily speculating that Marjorie and a member of the Scientific American Board, Carrington, were having an affair. But before those rumors could get two out of hand, Budini completed his box, a contraption that only allowed Marjorie's head and hands to have freedom of motion. He seems to find this fair, writing to a friend that he would allow Marjorie Crandon to keep the seance room dark. I want to give Mrs Crandon every possible chance to make good, and if she possesses any psychic power, I will be the first to assist her in this mission. During this trial, the bells rang as usual, but upon turning the lights on, the box had been partially forced open. Didn't look great for Marjorie. Her support on the Scientific American Board was dwindling, with only Carrington, who was suspected to be having an affair with her, fully in her corner. Houdini, on the other hand, was ruthless and very opportunistic at this time, taking every chance he could to disparage Marjorie publicly and monetize his theory that she was a fraud. It became a regular and popular part of his live act, just being a hater. It's the same ikey feeling you get when a true crime podcast is, like, we're going on tour to talk about murders in your area. At the end of August, another seance took place where Marjorie's hands were bound and nothing materialized. At this point, the magazine felt she was beat, but Walter the Spirit persisted, Houdini, you think you're so smart, don't you. How much are they paying you to stop this? Phenomena. Now not to side with Walter, but if I may, I don't think that shoving someone in a tiny unventilated box in a tiny unventilated room is conducive for doing anything much less. During the dead, another science at Boston's Charles Gate Hotel produced the biggest controversy between Crandon and Houdini yet. Marjorie had a successful seance in Houdini's box, but when it ended, he found a ruler and accused her of using it to pull off tricks. This caused Walter the spirit to flip, and he claimed that Houdini had done it himself. I love what he says here. Buckle in the ghost says Houdini, You goddamn son of a bitch, get the hell out of here. Never come back. If you don't, I will. You won't live forever. Houdini. You've got to die. I put a curse on you now that will follow you every day until you die, and then you'll know better. Holy shit, man. Judini was said by those present to be pretty scared and insulted at this outburst. He was said to like sort of panic and be like, my parents were married when I was born. What are you talking about. Of course, Houdini press sense this event much differently, casting himself as the hero once more. Decades later, a Houdini biographer claimed that Houdini's assistant had planted the ruler, but even this fact has been disputed. The man who had written the biography was William Lindsay Gresham, author of the famously anti spiritualism and anti mediumship novel Nightmare Ali, a book that ironically mocks the exact kind of physical mediumship that Marjorie is performing. But at this point in the trials, Judini felt that one more slightly off science would lose Marjorie the contest. Now, Judini was known to be a bit of a prude, and he seemed deeply uncomfortable with the more sexual aspects of Marjorie's persona. Other judges would touch her while she was making ectoplasm, not with eva c sexual intensity, but the whole process was a semi erotic thing to do with a hot lady in a robe while her husband was sitting right there. Instead of participating, Udini said nasty things about her. He accused her of keeping a refrigerator in her vagina, as well as making some pretty unforgivable accusations against her. Ahead of their next seance, he said that a time where Marjorie allowed him to nap at her house on Lime Street after a seance they performed there, she had been trying to seduce him. By all accounts, this is not true, but I do want to demonstrate that Houdini was coming at her relentlessly and then locking her in a box. At their final seance, Marjorie started sweating and overheated and couldn't move and produced nothing. Udini wrote in his postmortem to the Scientific American, I charged Mrs Crandon with daily performing her feets like a natural conjurer. She is not simple or guileless that a shrewd cunning woman. Ahead of the results being announced in the Scientific American, Marjorie complained that Houdini's spirit box set her up for failure, and even after ostensibly defeating her, Houdini continued to monetize Marjorie's potential public humiliation. He published a pamphlet called Houdini Exposes the Tricks used by the Boston medium Marjorie in Hurst Magazines, where he explicitly accuses Bird and Carrington as conspiring with Marjorie, while she rallied her spiritualist supporters and started holding seances and public showings again in spite of him. Houdini wouldn't relent. He tracked down a photo of her brother Walter's train accident horrifying and showed it in public. He also showed off what he thought she was doing, balancing spirit trumpets on her head and using her feet to ring bells. At this point, even Dennie's supporters felt like it was getting weird. He won. Why can't you let it go? The truth of all the matter is that Marjorie and my belief is a social climber, oh right, misogyny. He doesn't like her, so you see this pattern of him using any gendered attack he can think of to cut her down. It's worth mentioning that Marjorie and Arthur Conan Doyle are barely speaking to press, and they don't speak ill of Houdini publicly during this time at all. Instead, Marjorie focused on getting second opinions and got a pretty favorable outcome from a prominent psychical researcher named Eric Dingwall, who had busted a number of prominent mediums, but outside of suspecting that she put ectoplasm in her vagina in advance, couldn't disprove her ability before the Scientific American announced their verdict. Marjorie was a nervous wreck, and Houdini didn't give a ship. He wrote to a friend, no surprises me about Marjorie. A woman who would drag her dead brother from the grave and exploit him before the public as a means of gaining social prominence, would do anything. The results came out in February ninety five, and Marjory lost the money and the recognition. Her spirit hands had been analyzed and identified not as supernatural material but as a hunk of animal trachea. The Scientific American contest technically continued through the early nineteen forties, even boasting a fifteen thousand dollar prize at one point, but it was never given this level of public attention again, and spiritualism never caught back on in the same way. Marjory, to her credit, was a class act about the loss, saying in a public statement, the decision does not bother me at all, and I can certainly say I'm neither discouraged or disappointed. Any further damon must come from my husband and privately she was depressed. Now referred to as the Witch of Beacon Street, she said she quote does not find myself dancing around as joyously as I once did unquote. Houdini, on the other hand, rode out the success of ruining Marjorie in public, and for the remainder of his life dedicated a lot of his time to exposing medium trickery. Between his own magic shows. He started this group called my own Personal Secret Service, Oh Babe, and he would disguise himself as he went from city to city, attending seances and taking people down, often trying to get mediums arrested for fraud. While the antifortune telling and which laws from generations past were mostly dormant, some of them still did exist. It's so bizarre. I mean, it's this very successful person traveling around the country like a godless missionary, wearing mustachio disguises and saying, surprise, bitch, it's Houdini, and everything you ever believed is a lie. I don't know where this instinct comes from. I mean, it wasn't a hard dedication to the truth. Houdini stretched the truth all the time, and he himself had overcome so much personally, he'd overcome poverty, he'd overcome the American attitudes towards Jewish people in the early twentieth century. Houdini was treated anti semitically at many points in his career, sometimes by spiritualists. But I still can't figure out why this is the hill he chooses to die on time and time again, no matter who he has to take out to get there. I think it connects more than anything else that his not being able to talk to his mom one last time. It reached the point where Houdini was lobbying President Coolidge to reinstate anti fortune telling bills, And even with all this going on, still could not let Marjorie Crandon go and sent a spy reporter to buddy up with her. Read between the lines and you will see I accused Marjorie of using sex charm and it has been authenticated, he told a friend. This sequence of events sort of recalls another successful, difficult to bust female medium from the eighteen seventies. Her name was Florence Cook, and she channeled a woman named Katie King, a daughter of an imperialist gikes. Cook could make her spirit guide full body manifest during seances. Arthur Conan Doyle was known to show her spirit photographs on the road. While Cook wasn't framed for fraud at the time, a similarly slight shamy dismissal of her abilities was launched. A man told the Society for Psychical Research that he'd had an affair with Florence and that she'd had a long standing affair with William Crooks, the investigator who was supposed to be investigating her. In the end, Crooks was knighted and moved on with his life just fine, and Florence Cook was revealed to have been dressing up as Katie the whole time. You know how this story goes at this point, when she died of pneumonia in poverty in nineteen o four, Houdini reached the apex of being on his bullshit in n when he managed to get all the way through to pitching to a Congress subcommittee. He spent four days arguing House Resolution eight nine eight nine, which sought to ban fortune telling in d C. This turned into a complete circus. Mediums and psychics from all over came in protest and to defend themselves, their religion, and their practices. What this translated to was a Congress floor full of psychics wild but as it turned out, d C wasn't really a smart venue for Houdini to choose his hill to die on. In the nineteenth century, two first Ladies had held seance as in the White House, and Florence Harding, who had lived there in the previous presidency, famously had a psychic advisor. In fact, her psychic advisor showed up to the congressional hearing to defend herself. The bill Houdini was proposing included a two fifty dollar penalty and language that implied it was scientifically impossible to be a medium rods from start to finish, mental degenerates, or deliberate cheats. In the end, Houdini lost this battle. Everyone in Congress was kind of like relax man, and he was thought to have gone too far when accusing the sitting president of seeking a psychic's help, said Representative Ralph Gilbert of Kentucky. I believe in Santa Claus, and I believe in fairies in a way, and Houdini is taking the matter entirely too seriously. That's what I've been saying this whole damn show. Ralph, thank you As it turned out, Houdini didn't have much more time to stir ship. He died later that year, a very magician's death mysterious, and on Halloween, while backstage in Montreal, he was approached by a man who asked Houdini if he believed in the Bible and quote, whether it was true that punches in the stomach did not hurt you unquote. Houdini brushed it off and joked that his stomach could handle a lot, and the guy punched him several times hard in the stomach. He died of appendicitis just several days later. Houdini's wife Bess spoke on his interest in life after death often after he passed, as in this radio clip, Mary, you kneel my husband a long time, and you remember what he always said about these things, that it was impossible for the dead to return. That's problem. He was right. Well, if it would have been possible, I would have had some sign from him in the past ten years. Bes always said that Houdini had told her how he would manifest in the afterlife, what he'd say if he could communicate with her from beyond the grave, and that for as long as a decade she held annual seances on Halloween to see if he would return. He never showed. Ten years is long enough to wait for any man, but not for hardcore Houdini fans. The spirit Circle still takes place every year on Halloween. People are still waiting. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle was finally able to take some pot shots at Houdini four years after his death in his book The Edge of the Unknown. Good Ship like this, there was no consideration of years old, which would restrain him if he saw his way to an advertisement. But when Houdinie first dies, Doyle is sweet in memorializing his former friend, which genuinely seemed to touch Udini's widow best. She revealed the Doyle that among her husband's gigantic collection of oddities, there was one item he would never sell, a notebook full of drawings that have belonged to and been drawn by Arthur Conan Doyle's father. I mean, why can't men just be friends? That's so nice. Doyle himself lived until nineteen thirty, dying of a heart attack. His last words were telling his wife, Jean, whose mediumship he had always believed in, you are wonderful, Marjorie continued to practice seances in Boston until her death. When asked by a psychic researcher what her secret was on her deathbed, she remained the best. I said, you can go to hell. All you psychic researchers can go to hell. Why don't you guess? You'll all be guessing for the rest of your lives, so ectoplasm. Look, I'm not making this show to tell you what is real and what isn't in the spirit realm, I don't know. And as much as I love the Houdini Doyle saga, I think it's more important to remember that the target of their rage or religious feelings, respectively, we're connected to real bodies, much more vulnerable than their own. And honestly, I don't care if Mina Crandon was a fraud. I think she was brilliant, pulling yourself out of poverty against all odds to live a life, scamming famous scientists into thinking your vaginal discharge is fucking magical. It's like, are you serious? Can you tell me with a straight face that isn't fucking awesome? I hope Mina Crandon gets a movie someday. Her story has never been really adapted properly, and the Houdinian Doyle story has been told badly and more than once. Okay, one more tangent. There was a show on I t V in the UK called Houdini and Doyle. I will not dox the actors, but it's the most recent past at this concept that reimagines these men who really just disagreed on spiritualism and we're friends for no more than a couple of years. But in this show there buddy cops. It got canceled after a few episodes, because of course it did. But Houdini and Doyle as buddy cops is such a startlingly bad idea that it might actually be an amazing idea. Every religion for centuries has told us the death isn't the end. Nothing is as it was just ten years ago, maybe not even death a load of crap. I can have this case myself without help from the Rocks. Are a magician? Are your police officers? We're working with the police. Yet, fear is a good thing. It's only when you admit that you're afraid the fear loses its power. Houdini and Doyle coming in two thousand and sixteen to I t V Encore. No, it's a bad idea, but you've gotta hand it to them. They put that on television on purpose, and the story of Houdini, Doyle, and Mina Crandon in many ways covers the peaks and valleys of the second wave of American Spiritualism, the last major revival of the movement, although I would not rule out a third on the horizon. I want to end on a quote from Walter the Ghost. Actually he once said this through his sister Mina out of seance, for life is full of boxes closed and death follows right along. The only difference I can see is you sing in your box when you're gone. Next week, the end of Ghost Church approaches. I have a dinner to get to with one of the mediums of Cassadega. I've got some secrets to keep, and I've got some conclusions to reach. See you there. And also I have COVID nineteen right now and I can't set boundaries, so I know my voice sounds weird. Have a good week. Ghost Church is a Cool Zone Media production created, written and hosted by me Jamie Loftus. The show is produced by Sophie Lichterman, edited by Ian Johnson, Our theme song is by Speedy Ortiz. That's Sadie Dupree, Andy Moholt, Audreys White Sides and Joey Dubeck. Music is by Zoe Bade. Huge thank you to Paul ev Tomkins for playing Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and to Robert Evans for playing Harry Dean. Additional parts were played by the wonderful Ghost Church team Ian Johnson and Sophie Lichton. And thanks guys, Keep the Kid